Rants and Raves on Espresso

July 2012

Copy-editors are strange beasts. They can take a perfectly valid story, dress it up with titles and subheds, and transform it into something that sounds completely irrelevant to the contents within. Take yesterday’s Wall Street Journal piece on efforts seeking the genetic diversification of consumable coffee: The Indiana Jones of Coffee – WSJ.com (subhed: “Companies Go Deep Into Africa in Search of Perfect Bean”).

No, it’s not a bio piece about some swashbuckling snake-charmer in search of lost coffee gold. The Orchid Thief would be a more appropriate movie reference for just one of the characters in the article. It’s also not about Africa, as the genetic diversification effort is global. It’s not even about the ever-abused mythical “perfect bean” — as any single genetic coffee bean lineage would be just as susceptible to a mass extinction event as the limited coffee progeny we enjoy today.

But peel back the superficial layers of Hollywood pomp, general cluelessness, and deceit, and you’ll discover a decent article on efforts to develop more genetically robust and diverse options for our drinkable coffee stocks — something of a follow-up to a post we wrote six years ago. Of some 26 documented coffee species, only two are cultivated to produce something humans would actually pay money to consume. And of those two, many consider only one of them as drinkable.